Rob FollowRob is a developer at IDRSolutions, currently working on JPedal and the BuildVu Microservice Example, including the Ruby, Python and C# Clients.
In his spare time he enjoys riding his motorcycle, playing guitar in his band and studying languages that don't require a semicolon at the end of each line (currently Bulgarian and Go).

3 sessions I am looking forward to at Devoxx Belgium

October 25, 2017 1 min read

In a few weeks, myself and my colleague Ovi will be travelling to Antwerp to attend Devoxx Belgium. Being Europe’s biggest community conference, there’s tons of cutting-edge content to see and do. Here are 3 talks I’m looking forward to:

Java9 and REPL. Forget debugging, welcome joy and productivity

In this talk, Jakub Marchwicki is going to give a walk through on how you can use JShell to try out new libraries, explore APIs and language features from the command line. Being able to quickly and easily test stuff on the command line is definitely a welcome change for me – no more having to create a new project called “Sandbox” everytime I find something new I want to play around with! You can read more about JShell and how it works here.

Modules in One Lesson

In this talk, Mark Reinhold is going to give a practical demonstration of Project Jigsaw and the new Module System introduced in Java 9. The idea that you can now configure the JDK exactly how you like it is quite interesting to me – so what better way to find out more than from the lead of Project Jigsaw himself? Hopefully, we’ll be able to take advantage of the benefits such as improved performance, a potentially smaller JDK and better security that the new module system offers. You can learn more about Java 9 modules here.

Kotlin for Java Programmers

I’ve been hearing more about JetBrain’s programming language recently, especially since it was announced to be fully supported on Android at Google I/O earlier this year. In this talk, Venkat Subramaniam will take a look at Kotlin’s pros, cons, how it works in the Java ecosystem and how Java programmers like myself can benefit from it. With cool features (compared to Java) such as not allowing null types by default, smart casting and secondary constructors, Kotlin looks like it would be a really good complement to Java – they’re both 100% interoperable!

Bonus: Blade Runner 2049

It would truly be a waste to go to Europe’s second-biggest cinema complex and not see a movie – so that’s exactly what I plan on doing Thursday evening at the conference. This year, they’re showing Blade Runner 2049, the sequel to the 80’s science fiction hit Blade Runner.

Will you be at Devoxx Belgium this year? If not, you can still watch the talks over on Devoxx’s YouTube channel – they livestream the event, and videos of each talk usually appear there a week or so after the conference finishes.

Rob FollowRob is a developer at IDRSolutions, currently working on JPedal and the BuildVu Microservice Example, including the Ruby, Python and C# Clients.
In his spare time he enjoys riding his motorcycle, playing guitar in his band and studying languages that don't require a semicolon at the end of each line (currently Bulgarian and Go).